Abstract
Fish of many species propel themselves through water by rhythmic undulations; fins are used for stabilization and change of direction, but not for stereotypic straight line movements [1], The undulations are caused by contractions which pass down the muscles along the spinal cord (with muscles on the opposite sides of the fish 180° out of phase). These contractions are in turn directed by motoneurons which emerge from special positions in the spinal cord having a spatial periodicity that matches the segmentation of the backbone. Measurements from these positions (“ventral roots”) show rhythmic voltage changes (bursts of activity) at each such point, with a uniform frequency and a phase lag between any two points that are proportional to the distance between the points; i.e., the neural activity is a constant speed travelling wave. For technical reasons, much of this data has been gathered for dogfish and lamprey [1,2]; some of the observations have been corroborated for other species.
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Kopell, N. (1986). Coupled Oscillators and Locomotion by Fish. In: Othmer, H.G. (eds) Nonlinear Oscillations in Biology and Chemistry. Lecture Notes in Biomathematics, vol 66. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-93318-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-93318-9_10
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